What It Took

(10 of 11)

By the second debate, Gore was so conscious of the need to back off that he practically disappeared, and it confused people about who he really was. The last debate was Gore's best, but by then it was almost too late. Bush prepared for the last debate by praying with James Robison, a television evangelist, for "calm, confidence and the wisdom to know when to speak and when not to speak." And then he went fishing.

The Florida Gambit
Bush's war planners held no single article of faith more dearly than this: the Governor started the general-election campaign with two huge states, worth 57 electoral votes: Texas and Florida. Together they were worth more than California, the top Gore stronghold. Jeb Bush was Florida's Governor, and Bush's father had held the Sunshine State against Clinton in 1992. Florida was, they assumed, Bush Country.

Gore thought so too, at least at first. Gore's team figured it would take at least $10 million to win it back--a big chunk of change best held in reserve for elsewhere. And so Gore's early attentions to the state were just head fakes, designed to scare Bush into wasting some money there. But then the polling came in. "What we found when we got here a year and half ago was that we just polled better here," said Chris Lehane. "If we were down 15 nationally, Florida was down only 9. After the primaries, we were down in the rest by 8, but here by 4," says Lehane. "I think we thought that would change, that Bush would spend some money and we'd see a turn in the numbers. But we didn't."

The more Gore's aides looked at Florida, the more it looked like, say, New Jersey. The demographics had shifted in the 1990s with more non-Cuban Caribbean immigrants coming into the state. These groups balanced the Cuban-American tendency to lean toward the G.O.P. Seniors made up 33% of the vote--which made them ripe for persuasion on prescription drugs, Medicare and Social Security. The Everglades and an offshore oil-drilling ban loomed as environmental issues. And there was a huge swath of apolitical voters in the central part of the state who worked in the hotels and restaurants and service industries that straddled Interstate 4. They voted Republican in statewide races, but tilted Democratic on national issues.

Someone else was scraping for a fight over Florida: Bill Clinton. In one of his earliest bull sessions with Coelho, Clinton ranted about how he still regretted allowing his political advisers to talk him out of contesting Florida in that first race, how he came so close to winning in 1992 and proved them all wrong by taking the state in 1996. "He felt that Florida was a state he could do," Coelho recalled. "He said, 'Don't make the mistake I made.'"

Last summer Coelho contacted the virulently anti-Castro Mas Canosa family and discovered that the Cuban-American community was not completely locked up by the G.O.P. Gore had other advantages: the state attorney general, Bob Butterworth, took control of Gore's statewide operation. Devine and Shrum were close to Miami's mayor, Joe Carollo, and they were simultaneously working on Bill Nelson's Senate race, which showed Floridians' giving a 20-point edge to a Democrat--any Democrat--on the question of whom they trusted to take better care of Medicare and Social Security.

The ad war began early, in June in Tampa, Orlando and West Palm Beach. When those ads boosted Gore's ratings for leadership and strength of character, Team Gore expanded the buy statewide. And no single ad turned out to be as important to narrowing the gap than the one that accused Bush of promising "the same money to young workers and seniors." That 30-second spot alone boosted Gore's rating by 10 points among senior citizens--and by Nov. 1, he was running neck and neck in the Sunshine State.

"Arrogant Is Not a Disqualifier"
At 8:15 one morning in Nashville, during the final week, the Gore campaign's high command gathered in the large, soul-free room they call "the kitchen." It looked like a corporate cave, furnished out of Office Depot, with a huge table and more computers, telephones and ugly chairs scattered around it than you could count. The group was connected to the D.N.C. by conference call, preparing for a day that would launch the last big drive of the campaign. It was a 15-minute daily ritual, although it had become more infrequent in the final days of the campaign.

Gore was to appear that day in Wisconsin--a state in which he was ahead but only narrowly. Klain, the former Gore chief of staff who had been brought back by chairman Daley to run the kitchen, explained the schedule: the Vice President would give a "big framing speech to set up the final week... We're also talking about today, for the first time in a big way, the fork in the road."